Due to the proliferation of wireless networks, there are a continually increasing number of wireless devices in use today. These devices include mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) with wireless communication capabilities, two-way pagers and the like. Concurrently with the increase of available wireless devices, software applications running on such devices have increased their utility. For example, the wireless device may include an application that retrieves a weather report for a list of desired cities or an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the ability to transmit data of the wireless network in order to provide timely and useful services to users, often in addition to voice communication. However, due to a plethora of different types of devices, restricted resources of some devices, and complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
A wireless handheld device has limited battery power, memory and processing capacity. Since communication on a device is very expensive in terms of energy consumption, it is desirable to minimize message traffic to and from the device as much as possible.
With the emerging importance of Web services in the IT business, more and more IT actors are providing a standardized access to their business through the Web services. However, in the IT landscape there is still a huge number of applications not exposing information through Web services, but relying instead on different data sources: databases, CORBA applications, etc.
Mobile applications can be used for integrating various data source. The traditional development of wireless applications is highly impacted by the nature of the data sources the wireless application communicates with. The connection infrastructure to a specific data source (database, Web service, etc) has to be built inside the wireless application itself, consuming the valuable wireless resources.